ABSTRACT
On the occasion of the 150-year anniversary of the Communist Manifesto, a New York Times columnist observed that Marx and Engels had ‘recognized the unstoppable wealth-creating power of capitalism, predicted it would conquer the world, and warned that this inevitable globalization of national economies and cultures would have divisive and painful consequences’ (Lewis 1998). Marking the same anniversary, Hobsbawm noted that ‘what might in 1848 have struck an uncommitted reader as revolutionary rhetoric or, at best, as plausible prediction – can now be read as a concise characterization of capitalism at the end of the twentieth century’ (1998: 18). Marx and Engels long ago recognized that capitalism made globalization inevitable, which is why they proposed that political activism also had to operate at an international scale.
